What can we see when we learn that childhood experience stored in the body? We can see our adult health in the liberated and free expression of empowering love experienced in childhood. We can see bodily and relational illness as a reflection of the battle for the authentic self to escape from the oppression of the mandate to honor and love those who have hurt us. Throughout The Body Never Lies, Miller offers a calm and encouraging voice. Indeed, The Body Never Lies, through its illuminating and provocative insight, affords us a unique understanding of the immense healing powers of the adult self and the body.

The Body Never Lies | Alice Miller, Andrew Jenkins | W. W

To get better, from whatever we want to, we have to find a place in our mind to get us into a different state. We have to flip a bit of a switch from despair into a place of hope, so that we can take action. And not the action of spending more time on google trying to find a solution, but the action of being a part of our life. Techniques of converting “negative” emotions into “positive” emotions will fail. Why? Because these manipulations reinforce denial, rather than leading to honest confrontations with one’s authentic emotions. And forgiveness, Miller reminds us, has never had a healing effect. Preaching forgiveness is hypocritical, futile, and actively harmful. Harmful because the body doesn’t understand moral precepts. One may rightly forgive their parents if they realize what they’ve done, though, if they apologize for the pain they’ve caused. Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.”In The Body Never Lies Alice Miller continues her analysis of the links between our experiences in childhood and their impact and value in our lives as adults. In this book she courageously explores two themes central to our individual, relational and political health: the connections between our adult body, mind and spirit and childhood, and the religious and cultural prescription to love and forgive our childhood oppressors found in the Fourth Commandment’s mandate to “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother”. After coasting through the past ten years in a fog of depression, emptiness, and unfulfilling relationships, I started seeing a counselor who recommended this book to me. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed my life. Ever since I can remember, I have idealized my parents and my childhood, never realizing the myriad subtle ways that my narcissistic parent denied me expression of my true feelings and my real self. Storing up all those feelings ever since infancy, in an effort to win the parent’s love and protect them from one’s true self, has a poisonous effect on the body and the mind. As much as we try to hide those true feelings, they make themselves known through various kinds of suffering, both emotional and physical. This is the premise of Miller’s book.

The Body Never Lies on Apple Podcasts ‎The Body Never Lies on Apple Podcasts

Our daily responses to the world may be divided into the physical and emotional, yet these two categories are not autonomous. Our health is frequently damaged by long repressed feelings of emotional trauma, anger about being spanked or otherwise, these are hurts that we may have never consciously processed because to do so might break social mores. Over the decades since childhood, feelings of humiliation, rage, and powerlessness can fester if we insist on remembering a happy upbringing; untreated, these feelings will eventually manifest themselves in fatal illness. Such was the case, Miller shows, with such filially pious and brilliant authors as Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Rimbaud’s suffering under a malevolent and unsupportive mother drove him to the drug addiction, restless traveling, and bottomless self-loathing that finally caused him to give up writing and turn to business; he died at thirty-seven of cancer. Wolf committed suicide after accepting that her step-brothers’ childhood molestation of her was her fault — the result of her own sexual fantasies according to Freudian theory. A suffocating mother kept Proust from publishing his masterwork In Search of Lost Time until after her death, for fear its incisive indictment of bourgeois values would offend her; an asthma victim since childhood, he died just two months after its publication. We now have many reports in which mothers (and, in the ourchildhood forums on the Internet, also fathers) give honest accounts of how they have been prevented from loving their children as a result of the injuries inflicted on them in their own childhood. We can learn from them, and if we do, we will cease to idealize motherly love at all costs. Then we will no longer be forced to analyze infants as screaming monsters. Instead we will begin to understand their inner worlds, to grasp the loneliness and impotence of children growing up with parents that deny them any kind of loving communication because they themselves have never experienced it. Then we will recognize in the screams of the infant a logical and justified response to the usually unconscious but none the less factual and real cruelties of the parents, which have yet to be appreciated as such by society. An equally natural response is the despair of individuals about their damaged lives, a despair that some trauma therapies attempt to alleviate with the aid of “positive thinking”. But it is precisely these strong “negative” emotions that enable us to recognize how we must have felt when we were ignored or treated cruelly by our parents. We absolutely need this recognition to eventually overcome the painful effects of the traumas. We’re going a bit off the topic of myths this week, because so many of you have been asking me, in terms of fitness, health and recovery, what is the long way home? What does that really mean? And I get that, because a goal needs to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely otherwise it's just this obscure, arbitrary, vast unattainable thing way out in some time in the future, maybe never.Today, my guest is independent researcher Giorgi Dinkov, whose focus is on biochemistry and physiology. Giorgi has become a great resource for me, which has helped with so many clients, and so I wanted his biology and chemistry expertise to talk about all things supplementation.